


Meeting the parent | last impressions.

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [11]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Established Relationship, F/F, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 01:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1180521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The women knelt on the hillside below the blooming tree, gifts of rice wine and his favoured living sweets in their palms. With a spark born of metal scraping on metal, Lan Fan lit the two thin sticks of incense, murmuring a prayer in a language May did not and could not understand.</p><p>Despite the Qing Ming Festival yet months away in the spring past the new year, the huntsmen of the southern mountains celebrated the anniversaries of births rather than the anniversaries of deaths. And so Lan Fan, her tongue contorting into the shape of words whose meaning she had long lost but whose sound remained engraved in the annals of her childhood, inclined her head. Wisps of smoke mingling with the falling snow to coat the white expanse in droplets of grey. Smoke, for her grandfather, cremated and scattered to ride the wind, had no true grave. The huntsmen of the southern mountains carried their dead on their shoulders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meeting the parent | last impressions.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firus_rising](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=firus_rising).



> Written for Femslash February. Prompt N5 on my bingo card, "Meeting the Parents". Dedicated to firus_rising, who really ought to consider getting an AO3 account and posting fic on there, too, so I can bookmark it, you crazy bastard.
> 
> Per my headcanons, Lan Fan's from a clan in the southern mountains.
> 
> Fun fact: I now have three half-written unfinished fics for Femslash February. Someday I intend to finish them. Sooooomeday.

The women knelt on the hillside below the blooming tree, gifts of rice wine and his favoured living sweets in their palms. With a spark born of metal scraping on metal, Lan Fan lit the two thin sticks of incense, murmuring a prayer in a language May did not and could not understand.

Despite the Qing Ming Festival yet months away in the spring past the new year, the huntsmen of the southern mountains celebrated the anniversaries of births rather than the anniversaries of deaths. And so Lan Fan, her tongue contorting into the shape of words whose meaning she had long lost but whose sound remained engraved in the annals of her childhood, inclined her head. Wisps of smoke mingling with the falling snow to coat the white expanse in droplets of grey. Smoke, for her grandfather, cremated and scattered to ride the wind, had no true grave. The huntsmen of the southern mountains carried their dead on their shoulders.

Xiao-Mei tucked herself further into the collar of May’s thick fur-woven shirt. Her knees ached from the harshness of the frozen ground. Skin prickled from the relentless cold. Limbs muted to static from the motionless observance. Yet she lowered her eyelids and _listened_. Not simply to the Pulse that whispered around her in its smooth waves of grace. But likewise to the words unfurling one by one from Lan Fan’s mouth. Uncoiling from the knot in her throat. Unwinding from the heavy iron in the pit of her stomach. On some distant cloud May sensed a distinct undercurrent of fear. That when the sounds ceased and the shadows parted, Lan Fan’s body would burn away her hands. Would feel foreign, alien, inhuman under her fingertips. Would have changed, somehow, as though the dead had risen again to strip her of her essential self and replace her with a glassy-eyed monstrosity drowning slowly in guilt.

No, not in guilt, but in shame. _Guilt_ implied that something had gone wrong; _guilt_ implied that Lan Fan would break under the weight of her grandfather’s death. But _shame_ , ah, _shame_ said that _you_ were the thing that had gone wrong; _shame_ said that Lan Fan would break under the weight of her inadequacy, of her inability to fulfill her grandfather’s dreams, of her incapability to realise the future that he had foreseen. Yet Yao Ling, the idiotic Prince of the Yao, had attained the throne under the guidance of the silence clasped in her flesh hand and the lethality clasped in her steel. Yet Yao Ling had carved a new Xing into the past-facing visage of the old. Yet Yao Ling had survived and lived still despite the numerous assassins and poison-mixers who would have either his head on a blade or his stomach vomited up through his throat.

No shame.

Unless the shame lay with _her_. With the failed Empress. With the Princess of the Chang, technically the rival of the Yao even after the reform.

At length Lan Fan’s chanting quieted. Slowed. Stopped altogether. She rose to her feet. Knees throbbing, May followed suit.

“May?”

“Mm?”

Lan Fan’s gaze extended somewhere into the heavens. Her cloaked _chi_ left no opening for May to read, left no instant for May to wiggle into. Then she spoke: “He would have loved you. My grandfather.”

Xiao-Mei licked the hollow of her throat. May clenched her jaw. “He would have?”

“I know him.” She closed her eyes. “He would have blessed us.”

“Ah.” May allowed her hand to linger on the inset of Lan Fan’s wrist. “Us?”

Lan Fan smiled faintly. “Mm. Us.”


End file.
